Yi Zhou’s practice often focuses on spaces related to water, where the fluidity of water in these spaces serves as an allegory for reflecting on his state of flow. Transcending borders and boundaries in his home city and nomadic locality as an artist, the fluidity of his geography also brings about changes in identity, shifting interpersonal relationships, and layered memories.

During his time in France, Yi Zhou transitioned from oil painting to working with video and photography. After he returned to Wuhan, he created a video work titled Transfer Station centered around a forgotten ferry in the city. Compared to the contemporary and everchanging urban fabrics in China’s megacity nowadays, this ferry embodies a sense of stagnation, almost as if it existed in the past. People transit through the dock, making brief stops before moving on to their next destination as if traveling through a time-space capsule. Back then, Yi Zhou was residing along the Yangtze River in Wuhan, and he often wandered around this area with a camera. He questioned the notion of center and periphery through the old ferry and other riverside facilities, as they carry the wind and breeze from a different time and space in the center of the upbeat fast-paced changes of Wuhan in the past years. For Yi Zhou, the representation for the visual construction of this space critically reflects on the right to the city regardless of one’s social-economical statues, on where and how can public space serve for a free and equal society. Moreover, this area seemed to provide Yi Zhou with a space for running away from home, a paradoxical state of leaving home without entirely leaving it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted Yi Zhou’s journey to leave home. With disrupted plans and timelines, our fates have been entangled and changed. During the webinars from London that he attended in Wuhan, Yi Zhou felt his late-night digitalized university life in Wuhan was layered with his friends’ memories in London. He often read the novels by Kazuo Ishiguro and somehow, the Japanese author stimulates his imaginaries on the British land, furthermore, triggers his realization of the absurdity of his fate, the complexity and subtle strains of personal and collective memories, and that sense of powerlessness during this and many more political turmoil.

The river seemed to become a dead river, and life in London seemed like a new location on the river. Yi Zhou felt like a nomad in the fluid cultural geography, and in moments of blurriness, memories of the waterfront were often surfaced again in his mind. Yi Zhou picked up his camera and followed the traces of water to search for traces of his own existence. The camera is an honest medium that confronts the overwhelming sense of uncertainty in the present by capturing the surface of our lived experiences.  For Yi Zhou, What the photographic images capture is an honest serendipity. In such a process, Yi Zhou sees images as both oracles and speculations to manufacture visual representations that cannot be explained by the here and now.